Semiconductor devices are electronic components that exploit the electronic properties of semiconductor materials, principally silicon, germanium and gallium arsenide. These devices for example, can be classified into memory devices to store data and logic devices to operate data or execute predetermined commands for the applications of electronic components. Memory devices may further be classified into volatile memory devices and nonvolatile memory devices. Characteristics of the volatile memory devices lose their stored data when their power supplies are interrupted, while nonvolatile memory devices retain their stored data even when their power supplies are interrupted. Volatile memory devices include DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) devices and SRAM (Static Random Access Memory) devices, and nonvolatile memory devices include flash memory devices, phase-changeable memory devices, and magnetic RAM (MRAM) devices.
To promote greater adoption, the semiconductor industry, from manufacturers to vendors, has agreed at great expense and effort to develop process of manufacturing devices toward miniaturization, multi-functionalization and/or high speed that underlie the semiconductor devices are increasingly becoming significant in electronic industries. With the advance in electronic industries, there are ever-increasing demands for high integration density, multi-functionalization, high speed, reproducibility and/or high reliability of semiconductor devices. It is recognized that traditional approaches do not adequately address the demands because trade-off may arise between these characteristics, there may be difficulty in satisfying all the demands. For example, decrease in feature size and/or distance of semiconductor patterns may make it difficult to increase operation speed of semiconductor devices and achieve reliability and/or reproducibility of semiconductor devices. Consequently, this negatively impacts to satisfy various requirements for semiconductor devices.
Therefore, there is a need for providing a contact structure effectively to support low resistance and high speed of devices yet achieving reliability and reproducibility when processing.